Just north of Stockholm, among the creaking Swedish ice-forests, three revolutions for 2013 are taking place.

Revolution One: Two researchers at the University of Uppsala have engineered a virus that will attack cancer. Cheap, precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects, this plucky little microbe sounds too good to be true. Yet in peer-reviewed articles in top journals, Professor Magnus Essand and Dr Justyna Leja have repeatedly showed that Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD views healthy tissue with disdain; it eats only tumours. It is, in effect, a cancer of cancer.

That viral infections can eliminate cancer cells has long been known. In 1896, a German woman with leukemia went into remission after catching flu. Her bloated liver and spleen shrank to almost normal size; her explosive white blood cell count dropped 70-fold. Some cancer patients who caught measles, hepatitis or glandular fever experienced temporary recovery. In 1949, in a rather wild set of experiments, patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma were injected with viral hepatitis: one died, 13 contracted hepatitis, but seven experienced temporary improvement. It wasn't until the swell in understanding of genetics in the 1990s that scientists learned how to manufacture and control the anti-tumour effect of these anti-cancer bugs.

What makes Essand and Leja's work revolutionary is that it involves a safe virus genetically engineered to attack a type of tumour known as neuroendocrine cancer (also called carcinoids or NETs). NETs can occur almost anywhere in the body, and will often tip-toe up and down the colon, around the liver and into the lung before your GP spots something wrong. Many other cancers, once they begin to spread, acquire features of NETs. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic NETs. A few years ago, scientists looked at intestines in more than 30,000 dead bodies and discovered that about one in 100 people have NETs. Many are benign, but some, for reasons unknown, explode into malignancy. More people have NETs than pancreatic and stomach cancer combined.

This could be the year that viruses lose their reputation for flesh-gobbling voracity and acquire the glint of a halo. It will also be the year film companies come to Uppsala. This story is made for Hollywood. Professor Essand spends his spare time kite-surfing, has his own rock band (made up of virotherapists) and is, to my irritation, barely 40 years old. Dr Leja is the image of Scarlett Johansson. She's also a weightlifter.

Revolution Two: I found out about Essand and Leja by stalking them online. Three years ago, my co-writer and editor, Dido Davies, was diagnosed with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer or "Steve Jobs Disease". Dido is the award-winning biographer of William Gerhardie and (as Rachel Swift) author of a series of bestselling women's "manuals", which my Aunt Mary wouldn't allow in the house. She is the wizard who kicks all my work into shape. Without her, I couldn't complete a single page.

Dido had eight hours of gruelling chemotherapy every three weeks following her diagnosis, and after sitting with her in hospital battling over our manuscripts, I would come home and spend the evening desperately searching the web for new treatments.

One day, I read about the virus Essand and Leja had engineered. Photographs in their reports showed tumours in mice melting away. Yet they were about to throw their virus in the rubbish bin.

Instantly, I Skyped the professor: "Why haven't you tested it on humans?"

"We don't have enough money."

I couldn't believe it: Steve Jobs had been one of the richest people in the world and this virus might have saved him. "How much money do you need?"

"£1m." said Essand. "Two million, for a really good version."

The problem is that the Uppsala virus doesn't have a patent. No biotech company can make a profit from it. And because of the financial crunch, there is no Swedish charity or government grants to fund human trials. Apple, the company Jobs turned into a $25bn-a-year mountain of profit, could pay for them with 11 minutes of its earnings. Yet Apple does not even reply to emails asking for assistance. This is where the second 2013 revolution from Uppsala comes in.

For the first time in medical history, Essand has offered to sell the name of a medical therapy in order to pay for its development. The idea is just the same as when a big donor squiggles out a cheque for a new museum exhibition hall or a hospital wing; only in this case, instead of having your name above the entrance lobby, it's branded on to a cancer treatment. It is not Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD that invades and destroys tumour cells, but the Put Your Name Here Virus. It is a gamble. If Essand's virus fails, the clinical trials you named peters into the footnotes of virology textbooks. But if Put Your Name Here Virus does work, you'll go down in medical history. The price for this groundbreaking philanthropic flutter? £1m. Less than the annual bonus of a mediocre hedge fund manager.

Revolution Three: Despite desperate pleas from patients and constant lobbying by the likes of the NET Patient Foundation and Cancer Research UK, it often takes more than 10 years for promising new drugs to come to market. Neuroendocrine cancer is a slow-growing disease, but it is not that lazy. The clinical testing procedure for new drugs is so cumbersome, burdened with regulatory hold-ups, clumsy co-ordination and industrial cock-fighting, that only huge injections of money and patience can see a new compound through.

Essand and Leja's third revolution is to try to break this bottleneck by launching a parallel fundraising drive for their new therapy using the internet phenomenon of crowdsourcing. Once again, it's a historical first. "When we saw their campaign go up, everyone here was taking notice, because it's new," exclaims Danae Ringelman, who set up crowdfunding site Indiegogo. "It's paving the way for people to think differently about which drugs should come to market. It's about people voting with their wallet for what people really want."

Crowdfunding is simple: it involves creating up a website that describes the therapy in detail; bringing in internationally respected peers to verify that the work is worth backing; providing links to the peer-reviewed articles that underpin the work, and stating clearly the therapy's potential for success or failure. After that, it's up to people on the internet to decide whether or not the idea intrigues them. Within the first three weeks of going on line, Essand and Leja had raised more than $100,000.

I have been so awed by the modest, inventive, determined spirit of these two revolutionaries, that I helped to set up that website, icancer.org.uk. I am proud to say that the bloke in the introductory video – the one with the carefully positioned curl of hair on his forehead – is me. I can't do the science, I don't have the finance, but I can at least be a part of the crowd that's clapping.